‘Dune: Part Two’ Is a Cliffhanger—But It May Be Years Before Part Three Arrives

The end, it turns out, is not near. Without revealing any details from the finale of Dune: Part Two, fans of Denis Villeneuve’s ethereal space epic should enter it braced for something of a cliff-hanger rather than a full-on resolution to the saga of Timothée Chalamet’s futuristic warrior prince.

When Villeneuve set out to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, about warring factions on a valuable but desolate sand world, he cleaved the narrative neatly into two parts. Since then, he has openly speculated about also adapting Herbert’s 1969 sequel, Dune: Messiah, to transform the two-parter into a trilogy. In Dune: Part Two, which opens on March 1, Villeneuve creates a path to that next installment, but notes that this isn’t his own invention. It remains faithful to Herbert’s climax in the original novel.

“That’s how the book ends,” Villeneuve tells Vanity Fair. “The Dune book ends with the beginning of something that is out of control, and I thought this was a very powerful ending. I feel that both movies complete the adaptation of the book, and I feel very good about that. When people ask me, is there a world where I could do Messiah? Yes…”

The Messiah novel takes place 12 years after the conclusion of the first book, so Chalamet’s Paul Atreides may be hanging from that cliff for a while before the audience revisits his situation. “I will respect again Frank Herbert’s idea to jump in time. That’s what I would love to do,” Villeneuve says.

Although Villeneuve has cleared a path for that next installment, he’s not sure yet when he wants to make the journey in his own personal timeline. “I did Part One and Part Two back-to-back,” he says. “I remember that the next morning after the Academy Awards ceremony, I was having a chat with Jane Campion…[who had just won best director for The Power of the Dog]. Jane was saying to me, ‘Oh, I’m going on a retreat to meditate for a month now.’ Another director was saying, ‘I’m going on this island to have fun with my family for three weeks. I need a six-month break right now.’”

He and his wife, Tanya Lapointe, a producer of the Dune movies, had no such breather. “Tanya and I, we were going back to Budapest and our crew was waiting for us. We were in full pre-production. We didn’t have a second to rest between Part One and Part Two,” Villeneuve says. “I’m not complaining! I’m explaining that now I would just like to settle down a little bit and to think about how to approach a third chapter, the adaptation of Dune: Messiah, which makes absolute sense because it’s the end of the arc of Paul Atreides.”

Herbert wrote several other Dune novels, progressing through subsequent generations of his searing universe, but Villeneuve, who was a fan of the books as a child, finds himself most closely aligned with Chalamet’s character. 

That doesn’t mean he intends to wait a dozen years to get back to work. The filmmaker says a break from Dune would help recharge his creativity and hopefully encourage him to take some bigger risks as the trilogy reaches its finale.

“I want to make sure that if we go back there a third time that it’ll be worth it, and that it would make something even better than Part Two,” Villeneuve says. “It needs to be different. I don’t want to fall into dogmas. I don’t want to fall into a vocabulary that has been predefined by the first two movies. I would love to make something different. We are figuring that out right now.”

The in-between time he seeks before returning relates mainly to producing and actually shooting a third Dune. Villeneuve admits that he has already started writing. “The screenplay’s in progress. I’m very happy where it’s going, but it’s not finished, and I don’t know how healthy it’ll be to go straight to Messiah right away,” he says. “It would be healthy to do something in between.”